Pregnancies happen all the time, but when are you going to see prices this low again?

April 29, 2011

So in the wake of Donald Trump suffering from a debilitating and continuing bout of “Guy Yelling Crazy Shit to the Media,” (a lot of that is going around; get your shots) there’s a movement to get companies to stop advertising on his NBC show, The Apprentice. I think we’ve gotten to the point where every company is being boycotted by someone, and if you’re not being boycotted you’re not doing it right, whatever it is. I’m sure someone is boycotting Renal Failure as you read this.

Anyway, one of the companies brought into this is Groupon, the deal-a-day via email people, and they released a statement on the issue. We’re ignoring the stuff about Donald Trump and his show and focusing on this particular paragraph (emphasis ours)…

Enough consumers have contacted us to warrant ensuring that we don’t place ads on the Apprentice homepage in the future. It’s the same reason we don’t run deals on guns or abortion…this isn’t a political statement, it’s avoiding intentionally upsetting a segment of our customers.

“Considering this whole online coupon thing depends a lot on impulse buying, I don’t think that discount abortions would do well,” I say to the roundtable of Renal Failure women I’ve gathered to discuss this issue, seeing as they would be the target audience for abortion deals on the Internet.

“Yeah, I don’t see women opening their email and saying ‘Hmm, I was thinking of bringing this pregnancy to term, but how can I resist this 65 percent discount?” says Tina the Lesbian. “I’d be a fool not to take advantage of such a steal!”

“Can we get coupons for contraceptives before we get coupons for abortions?” says Avonia the Wiccan Pimp. “Though to be fair, I’m not sure how comfortable I would be with discount condoms or birth control pills.”

“Depending on how the health care debate goes in this country, we might be a few years away from Full Groupon Healthcare,” says Samurai Cathy, referring to this recent Baltimore Sun article where you can get Groupon discounts for cosmetic dental work, chiropractic services, and eyeglasses. “People will be staring at their email inboxes, anxiously waiting to see if today’s deal will provide a discount for a medical service they desperately need but can’t afford.”

“And those emails will still be written in that Groupon humor style too,” says Tina the Lesbian. “Hey, do you like your feet? Well, with this discount on insulin you’ll be able to keep them a little while longer!”

“Breast cancer survivor groups will be abuzz with how much they saved on their mastectomies,” says Ninja Vicki. “And you don’t want to be the one who paid full retail for their chemotherapy. They’ll be whispering about it behind your back at church. You’ll never be able to show your face to them again.”

“Why stop at Groupon?” says Avonia the Wiccan Pimp. “Having trouble paying for medical care? Put your organs up on eBay. Or maybe you can find someone to remove your appendix on Craigslist. The invisible hand of the free market is ready to bitchslap the health out of your mouth.”

“Will there be an iDialysis app on the next generation of iPhones?” says Samurai Cathy. “That’s the next step for Apple: medical equipment. Then a whole segment of the population can get all indignant when they have to get into an MRI machine that doesn’t run on a Mac operating system.”

At the risk of nitpicking, no abortionist scrapes vaginas, just uteruses (unless it’s a doctor too old and tottery to still be doing abortions, but then the way the US is going the few that are crazy-brave enough to keep practicing will probably be called on to die in harness).